Little "Pomp and Blab" in Rocky Mtn. Politics

At a time when political pomp and blab have come to seem prohibitively pompous and bloviational, Rocky Mountain politics is fresh and innovative and fun.

That’s how writer Joe Klein sums up regional politics in this week’s Time magazine article, "The Democrats’ New Western Stars." It’s accompanied by a photo of Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer looking off to the horizon as he grasps a fence post.

The Rocky Mountain West has had its share of national coverage lately. The Democratic Party chose Denver as the site for its 2008 convention. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson announced today that he is forming an exploratory committee for a 2008 presidential run. The big Dem with a crew cut – Jon Tester – beat Republican stalwart Conrad Burns in the Montana Senate race last fall. Wyoming Democrat Dave Freudenthal handily defeated a Republican challenger for his second term as governor. Democrat Gary Trauner almost beat Barbara Cubin for Wyoming’s lone U.S. House seat.

And then there’s the weather. You can’t do much about that.

But you can change the political structure of the region, as we’ve seen the past few years. We’ve become red states for many reasons. It’s odd, considering the strong strain of populism that runs through the West. The loggers, railroaders, and construction workers that once voted for Democrats switched to Republicans over issues such as gun rights, access to federal lands, and logging restrictions. As Klein writes: "There is a distinct Rocky Mountain Democratic agenda, which emphasizes pragmatism and moderation. Some of the issues are local and perennial, including how to manage growth and resources like water in the nation's fastest-growing region."

This populism exerts itself in many ways. At the spring 2006 Democratic Party state convention in Cheyenne, the platform included planks for gun rights and against the Iraq War. The state chair of the AFL-CIO stood up and declared that his rank-and-file would not support a platform that did not come out strongly in favor of gun ownership. He received loud applause and the plank’s language was strengthened. There were planks about the Patriot Act and No Child Left Behind that advised the feds to keep out of our business. Meanwhile, at the Republican party congress, planks praised the president and his war and his Patriot Act and his education policy. Huge government programs with huge budgets that led us to huge deficits. The Repubs, of course, also confirmed their commitment to gun rights.

Which is the party that respects individual rights and opposes big government?

I’m an anti-war Democrat and make no bones about it. I had no problem with the war against Afghanistan’s Taliban. In the beginning, anyway, it had a clear-cut rationale and understandable goals. The same can’t be said for Iraq.

When I was going door-to-door for state Dem candidates last fall, there was one thing that kept coming up. People commented that they liked the governor because he showed up to see the troops off for deployments and welcomed them when they returned. He also had attended all the funerals of the state’s dead.

I wish the governor was publicly antiwar. But he’s never said anything about it. That’s politically savvy in a conservative state. It’s also practical. As his chief of staff told the Laramie County Democrats before the election: the Governor will never criticize the war as long as he has to send citizens off to fight. Period. That attitude continues post-election too.

Our Gov is a native to the state. He’s a hunter and he restores old sheep wagons in his spare time. He was a tough U.S. Attorney under Bill Clinton, an he remains a fighter and a feisty campaigner. The Republicans threw heaps of dirt on him last fall but he fought back, kept his cool, and came out clean – and re-elected.

Klein sums of the Western "libertarian streak" this way:

"Libertarian" is political shorthand for leave me alone. Democrats have not been very good traditionally at leave-me-alone politics. Malcolm Wallop, the Republican former Senator of Wyoming, got elected in 1976 partly because of a memorable political ad he ran of a cowboy packing a portable toilet strapped to the rear of his horse, allegedly the result of a federal regulation. And while the Democrats will never be natural Barry Goldwater libertarians, a young Republican named Ryan Sager uses regional polling in a new book, The Elephant in the Room, to demonstrate that people in the inner Mountain states are more secular than the G.O.P.'s Southern base, and increasingly impatient with Bible-touting moralizing.

That’s the wonderful part about politics in Wyoming – it’s not the South. I lived in the South for 14 years. There’s nothing here like the morass of religious fundamentalism you get in the old C.S.A. In Wyoming, you get the occasional rants about abortion and bornagainism, but nothing like you get in Dixie. Which brings up a question I’ve been meaning to ask: how do you explain the fundamentalist haven of Colorado Springs? Maybe it’s just an anomaly, which the West specializes in.

Let’s see what happens as we move toward 2008. We need a strong political candidate from the West. New Mexico’s Richardson may be the one. Or maybe someone else. We need an alternative to East Coasters such as Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden. We need someone who can stand up for personal rights on all fronts and who has a plan for energy independence. And someone with guts to end the Iraq War.

It was another contentious war that made headlines last year in Montana. At Schweitzer’s urging, the Montana state legislature passed a resolution opposing the Patriot Act. "Schweitzer decided to put some icing on the cake by pardoning 78 Montanans who had been convicted of sedition during World War I – a far more egregious case of the government trampling civil liberties than the Patriot Act is," according to Klein. He writes that the governor then said: "Most of them were German immigrants. Some of them were arrested for speaking German in public, others for refusing to buy war bonds. We had a big ceremony, and family members from 31 states came to honor their ancestors. It got pretty emotional."

It’s never too late to right a wrong. It's the cowboy way.